The blog for the cult Manhattan cable-access TV show that offers viewers the best in "everything from high art to low trash... and back again!" Find links to rare footage, original reviews, and reflections on pop culture and arthouse cinema.

Thursday, December 22, 2016

It’s been a rough year for everyone. There were countless
tragedies around the world, most Americans finally understood that our
political system is broken (whomever they supported), more jobs and industries
just disappeared (never to return), many of us had our personal sadnesses, and
a bunch of much-beloved cultural icons kicked off.

And now it’s Christmas. In an ordinary year, the holiday is
burdensome enough — with its many obligations and simultaneous message that
“time has passed, another year is gone, the clock is ticking, kids!” This year
the Yuletide means that the crapfest that was 2016 is finally at an end, but
another crapfest is on its way, right after this short break….

So I think it’s only right to once again get control over
the emotions that the holiday produces and turn the whole thing on its head.
DIVE into the misery and enjoy it! You ain’t getting’ away from it, so why not
listen to talented tunesmiths, great vocalists, and rockin’ bands commemorate
the emotional overload that is the holiday season?

Thus, I draw your attention my “Xmas Misery Megamix.” I
started creating this, with the help of many friends (all thanked in the
individual posts), well before Thanksgiving of last year, since Xmas music now
starts to crop up after Halloween. I have waited this year until we are only a
few days away from the Xmas holiday (and its less oppressive, but still
gift-driven, Hanukkah cousin) to revisit this trove of gorgeously depressing
music.

The first post I did about this topic was a super-survey of
the saddest ditties that mention the holiday or are identified with that time
of year. The selection here ranges from pop and classic r&b to novelty
records and punk songs. A special section is devoted to incredibly sad Xmas
country tunes and one of my fave candidates, submitted by a friend, a
well-known and well-loved Xmas carol from the 16th century that was written to
commemorate a massacre of children.

The artists included here include the Everly Brothers,
Lawrence Welk, Miles Davis, Tom Waits, Fear, Wall of Voodoo, and a host of
country music legends.

After I wrote the initial piece I found a few more choice
candidates and a few friends nominated their own favorites. Thus this second
entry, in which (for no particular reason) the miserable-mas songs are done
only by bands with one-word names. READ IT HERE.

In the third and final piece, I showcased the final two sad
songs, jumping from James Chance and the Contortions to Willie Tyler &
Lester. For some reason unknown to me, this shorter blog post was only a slight
bit behind the very lengthy first entry in the series in terms of views.
Perhaps all those Lester fans out there?

Sunday, December 11, 2016

Before the year closes, I wanted to mention two particularly
enjoyable moviegoing experiences I had. The first is chronicled in this piece.
In the time since this event occurred in Cambridge, there was a celebration of
the same film in L.A. with not only the director/star present, but also nearly
all the living cast members (including one who is now a big movie star on his
own, although his movies are dreadful). Since I live on the East Coast of the
U.S., I’m happy that there was a Shakes celebration closer
to home….

The majority of cult movies were, on their initial release,
complete flops at the box office and trashed by critics. Such was the fate of
Shakes the Clown (1991), Bobcat Goldthwait’s uncommonly
dark, and at times downright nasty, first film as a director/writer/star. The
film’s best review, by Betsy Sherman in The Boston Globe, took the right
tongue-in-cheek approach and contained the priceless line dubbing it “the
Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown movies.”

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the film, which,
thanks to cable showings and the blessed medium of VHS (later DVD) now has a
diehard cult of fans who appreciate its imaginative nastiness and terrific cast
of then-fledgling comedians. Shakes received its due at a
25th anniversary celebration on Sept. 22 at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge,
Mass. Bobcat was in attendance and the event reminded yrs truly of how grimly
funny the film is, and how it definitely led the way to Goldthwait’s subsequent
indie features.

Bobcat onstage at the Brattle

Shakes was a very odd move for Bobcat,
who was the better “screaming comedian of the Eighties.” (Bobcat’s was a comic
persona, whereas Sam Kinison’s rage and jokes about minorities seemed way too
real.) Bobcat’s onstage character was a nervous wreck who would shout out Tourette’s-like
outbursts of non-sequitur humor. With Shakes he abandoned
his strangulated standup voice and chose to play his character as a sarcastic,
hopeless drunk in a surreal clowns-only version of show biz (with the
much-loathed mime populace living on the fringe).

Bobcat spoke before and after the screening at the Brattle,
and was quite open about the film’s box-office failure — it put him, he says,
“in comedy jail” for several years afterwards, as his management (and audience)
had hoped he’d make a vehicle picture for his onstage persona (he had played
essentially the same character in three Police Academy
movies).

The film remains rewatchable because of several random
elements that stay in the memory, among them some wonderfully mean lines of
dialogue and the sheer absurdity of a serious “drunk at the end of his rope”
plot thread being situated in a world of colorful yet embittered clowns. The
35mm print shown at the Brattle had added “nostalgia value” since it was
slightly scratchy (much better in this reviewer’s opinion than the spotless 4K
restorations, which resemble high-def videos more than film).

The most interesting revelation that Bobcat was more than
happy to share was that some of the funniest moments in the film were ad-libbed
by the cast members. The performers in Shakes range from
then-unknowns (Adam Sandler, Kathy Griffin, Tom Kenny) to Eighties comedy stars
(Bobcat, Julie Brown, a pseudonymous Robin Williams) to old pros (LaWanda Page,
Paul Dooley, Sydney Lassick, and a seemingly game-for-anything Florence
Henderson). Bobcat maintained that he had a lot of surprises as he directed the
film, since the lines the cast were coming up with were better than the ones in
his script.

For example, perhaps my favorite line in the picture appears
in this scene with LaWanda Page who, according to Bobcat, made up her own
dialogue.

Indeed many fan favorite moments in
Shakes were created on-set by the performers. Julie Brown
gave her character a speech impediment. The two comics playing plainclothes
detectives came up with the random weirdness their characters talk about
(they’re my least-fave part of Shakes, but they do have some
great lines, including a consideration of what the hell a “Shondell” might be —
as in “Tommy James and the…”). Tom Kenny — best known these days known as the
voice of Spongebob Squarepants — steals the film outright, though, as Binky,
the cocaine-dealing party clown who is the film’s villain. Wearing makeup that
Bobcat said was based on John Wayne Gacy’s clown facepaint, Kenny is creepy and
funny as a character who seems like a hyper cousin of the Joker who happened to
wander into the cranky world of Shakes.

Bobcat did the intro to the film by himself but invited a
guest up for the Q&A after the film — his friend Tony V., a Boston standup
who appears in Shakes as one of the nasty rodeo clowns (the
film is indeed set in a world populated by different sorts of clowns). Tony
agreed that Bobcat’s original script was very unlike what finally reached the
screen. Which might explain the two strange sequences in which Shakes can
suddenly fly (which must’ve been leftovers from the original script).

Bobcat and Tony V. at the Brattle

A question from an audience member about a scene in which
Shakes juggles led to one of two great stories about the time that Bobcat and
Tony spent on the road together, touring as standups. Tony was teaching Bobcat
how to juggle, and an airport security guard detained them because of the
juggling pins found in their luggage. The guard wanted to be reassured that the
two weren’t terrorists, so he ordered them to juggle for him — which they did,
entertaining the other passengers waiting to get through security.

The other story they told about airport security was an even
more convoluted (and funnier) tale of a cop ingesting something that had been
in Tony’s nether regions (he tasted it to see if it was cocaine). One got the
impression that the two have been close friends for quite a while — Tony also
has a role in Goldthwait’s World’s Greatest Dad (2009) — and
their life on the road was filled with very weird events.

Here are the two pals appearing on the local TV show
“Charlestown Live”:

But back to the film: Its cult status has been underscored
by the fact that some of its lines of dialogue have shown up in other contexts.
REM’s song “Binky the Doormat” (from the 1996 album “New Adventures in Hi-Fi”)
was titled after one of Tom Kenny’s lines, and it was noted that an odd “code”
phrase used in the film — “The dolphin is in the Jacuzzi.” — was used by
certain dealers selling black-market Cuban cigars (!).

The most interesting story about unexpected publicity given
to the film concerns the time Bobcat was invited onto The Today
Show to promote the picture and was informed that he was going to
have to debate a clown — his answer to that, he informed us, was “I know the
deal… I’ve seen your show…”

But it was a real clown he had to debate, an angry
representative of the clown community who felt that Shakes
was adversely affecting the image of clowns around America. This entire event
being red meat to a polished standup comic, Bobcat then had to remark that the
clown seemed to lack a sense of humor. We were informed by the very proud Goldthwait,
that derider of clowns, that Katie Couric enshrined this ridiculous segment as
her worst-ever interview in her memoir.

Clearly Bobcat is still very proud of his debut as a
filmmaker, but he did note — having watched it again, sitting amongst the
cultists — that the film is poorly edited at points and he wished he could
re-edit certain sequences, including a car chase in which he had noticed that
the car being chased was behind the pursuers.

Although Shakes is indeed the broadest
comedy Bobcat has yet made a screenwriter-director, it definitely paved the way
for his later indie features, each of which could easily be described as “dark”
(or grim, depending on the sequence and the picture). Unlike Paul Feig or (god
forbid) Dennis Dugan, Goldthwait is a “comedy filmmaker” who has made a
different sort of film each time out of the box and has avoided the “kooky”
formulas that rule American movie comedies.

His next two features after Shakes,
Sleeping Dogs Lie (2006) and the Robin Williams-starrer
World’s Greatest Dad, were comedies that blended dark humor
with surprisingly moving messages about honesty. The first film indicates that
too much honesty can wreck intimate relationships; the second conveys the
message that too many lies, even ones that “mean well,” can wreck your whole
life.

Both films are very funny and very smart — this last aspect
shouldn’t be a surprise, but in a landscape filled with incredibly bad,
cookie-cutter American comedies (most of them vehicle pictures for
ex-SNL cast members), it is indeed rare.

The most encouraging thing for those of us who’ve been
following Goldthwait from the time he was the “screaming comedian” on late
night talk shows, was that he left behind comedy in his last two indie features.
The first, Willow Creek (2013), is a found footage thriller
(along the lines of The Blair Witch Project) that had
satiric aspects in a few scenes — about odd “Bigfoot” merchandising — but is
primarily a low-key horror flick. Call Me Lucky (2015) was
entirely different, as it’s a documentary portrait of comedian Barry Crimmins,
which explores his hard-edged left-wing comedy, his mentoring of younger
comedians (including Goldthwait), and the sexual abuse he suffered as a child
that has haunted his adult life.

So while Louis C.K. has been getting much attention (and
rightly so) for making tragicomedies that are unlike mainstream comedies,
Goldthwait has also continued to carve out a very unique niche for himself,
without casting himself in the lead (or even supporting) roles of his films.
The sharpest and nastiest satire he’s made, God Bless America
(2011), is an incredible time capsule that is both very funny in its mean (but
entirely accurate) depiction of America’s love of lowest-common-denominator
culture and sympathetic in its depiction of two “normal” souls (a middle-aged
man, played by Joel Murray, and a teen, played by Tara Lynne Barr) who get fed
up with the mediocrity that surrounds us.

If the film consisted of this one scene alone, it would
already be a significant work:

As for the fact that he chooses not to act in the films he’s
made since Shakes, Goldthwait explained this in the Brattle
Q&A when he noted that both Robin Williams and Joel Murray said to him
at one point in their respective shoots, “I get it… I’m playing you…”

After the Q&A was finished Bobcat hung around the
Brattle to talk with audience members and take pictures. When I asked what his
next film would be, he spoke with enthusiasm (and a characteristic note of
self-deprecation) about a new series he is making for the TruTV network, to be
called Bobcat Goldthwait’s Messed Up Stories. If the series
is anything like his films, it will be delightfully unpredictable (the key
virtue in the Funhouse philosophy). All he would say is that it will be his
very own Twilight Zone and will be (no surprise) “dark.”

And while I rarely would ever bug a celeb to take a picture with him/her, Bobcat was hanging out with the fans afterward. Thus this image of myself and the man, shot by my friend Paul G.

I look forward to seeing what he comes up with — any man who
starts his filmmaking career with an antisocial act of provocation like
Shakes deserves our attention.

Monday, December 5, 2016

Although his obits emphasized the fact that Raoul Coutard,
who died in early November at age 92, pretty much stumbled into being a
cinematographer — he thought he was being asked to take on-set stills for the
film in question by his old friend Pierre Schoendoerffer — he wound up crafting
some of the most beautiful images and kinetic camerawork in the films of the
French New Wave and related filmmakers. He is best identified with Funhouse
deity Jean-Luc Godard (aka Uncle Jean), who turned 86 last week. The pair
collaborated on sixteen absolutely perfect films, all of which feature gorgeous
and vibrant imagery.

Coutard was indeed a photo-journalist who had specialized in
war photography (he lived for over a decade in Vietnam) before he entered the
film world. His greatest claim to fame — and it is indeed a credit to be
reckoned with — is that he innovated ways to shoot “on the fly” with JLG on
A bout de souffle. His work with Godard is unassailable, as
it is a building block of modern cinema.

He worked with other filmmakers as well on what were some of
their best and most beautiful-looking films. He ran the gamut from pure verite
to stylized fantasy, doing camerawork for both Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s
landmark documentary Chronicle of a Summer (1961) and
Jacques Demy’s lighter-than-air romance Lola (also ‘61).

Besides Godard, the filmmaker he most frequently
collaborated with was Francois Truffaut (Godard’s best friend, and later
nemesis). The quartet of films Coutard shot for Truffaut are among his very
best. Shoot the Piano Player (1960) and Jules and
Jim (1962) were trendsetting tragic romances. The Soft
Skin (1964) features some of the most beautiful images in all of
Truffaut’s filmography, and The Bride Wore Black (1968) is
one of the finest-ever adaptations of noir-master Cornell Woolrich’s work.

Coutard had arguments with Truffaut over the last-mentioned
film that ensured they never worked together again. Coutard claimed
responsibility, saying he was trying to stop smoking during the shooting and
that made him impossible to deal with.

Costa-Gavras has been making sharply political films for the
last half-century. Two of his finest, and most successful, films were shot by
Coutard, Z (1969) and The Confession
(1970). The latter was quite controversial, as it showed the authoritarian
excesses of the Soviet Union; it was therefore perceived incorrectly by reviewers as a right-wing
film by an iconic left-wing filmmaker. The film is a haunting and memorable
tale of unjust imprisonment.

Z is one of the all-time greatest
political thrillers, an unforgettable mixture of plot, message, and
characterization — made even better by Coutard’s camerawork and the music of
Mikis Theodorakis.

Coutard kept working up until 2001. Unsurprisingly, the
filmmaker who used his talents best in his later years was a “younger brother”
of the French New Wave, namely Philippe Garrel. His The Birth of
Love (1993) stars Sixties icons Jean-Pierre Leaud and Lou Castel, and
perfectly captures the look and tone of the French New Wave.

Coutard’s first film as a director, Hoa
Binh (1970), received good reviews, won the Best First Film prize at
Cannes, and was up for the Best Foreign Film Oscar. The film offers a
Vietnamese boy’s perspective on the Vietnam War. His third and last film as a
director, S.A.S. Malko (1983), was unfortunately a
tacky-looking action flick that went straight to video in most countries:

The only proper place to end this tribute is, of course, to
discuss his sublime collaboration with Godard. Coutard was selected to shoot
A bout de souffle (1960) because of his documentary
background, and what he devised for Uncle Jean were several clever, innovative
ways to “steal” shots on the streets of Paris.

Aside from secreting the camera in
a mail cart and shooting in (and from) moving cars, Coutard was, of course, the
cameraman in the wheelchair (above) whom Godard pushed along the street to simulate a tracking
shot.

From those gritty beginnings Godard and Coutard moved on to
make some of the most perfect and sophisticated films of the decade, including
Vivre Sa Vie (1962), Contempt (1963),
Alphaville (1965), Two of Three Things I Know About
Her… (1967), and Weekend (also ’67). In each case
the film was excellent to begin with (as was the case with
Masculin-Feminin, the only non-Coutard Godard feature of
that era). But Coutard’s visuals, lighting, and work with colors (or stark
b&w, as in Alphaville) made the films even more perfect.

My choice for the finest of all would be Pierrot Le
Fou (1965), the “lovers on the run” drama-comedy-musical that covers
so much territory in its 110 minutes that it seems like a summation and/or
primer for those who are curious about Godard’s way of assembling a film,
crafting characters, framing his actors, and exploring the themes that he’s
still obsessed with today.

Godard’s films with other cinematographers are still
marvelous, but there’s something very special about the rapport he had with
Coutard. This is proven by the fact that the two best films Godard made in his
Eighties “comeback” period were both shot by Coutard.

Passion (1982) is an exquisitely
beautiful film that counterpoints activity in a factory with that in a nearby
movie studio. Stars Hanna Schygulla, Michel Piccoli, and Isabelle Huppert all
have some great moments, but the most gorgeous sequences are the ones in which
we watch the film-within-a-film being shot.

As is usually the case in Godard’s films about artistic
creation, the “interior” work is an unlikely prospect in which famous paintings
are recreated as live-action tableaux vivants. What results
are some stunningly beautiful images.

Godard's last film with Coutard is another masterpiece that
serves as a good “portal” to Uncle Jean's work. First Name:
Carmen (1983) is Godard's funny and bittersweet take on the Carmen
story. In the Eighties Godard crystallized a visual style that found him
frequently cutting to landscapes and the sky as punctuation to the actions of
his characters. (He had started doing this in the Sixties but it has been used
a lot more in his work in the last 35 years).

Coutard's contribution here is incalculable, as these shots
are gorgeously composed and lit, adding a sense of inevitability to the doomed
love affair that is at the core of the film. There are many moving sequences in
the film (and many great comic ones), none more so than this beautiful image of
impotence and lost love, set to Tom Waits' “Ruby's Arms.”

That sequence is only
present in a small shard on YT (I'm not sure if that is because ofcopyright troubles involving the music, or
"obscenity" troubles with the glorious nudity of Maruschka Detmers — America can’t
deal with the human body…). One of the only clips found is this fragment from
early in the film:

M. Coutard's beautiful images will most certainly live on
well into the future. Here is his most famous sequence, from
Contempt. He is, of course, the man behind the camera: